The Department of Russian, founded in 1952, is one of the earliest departments of Russian at China-based universities and colleges after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. It resumed enrollment in 1972 after some brief discontinuity, during which period some of its outstanding teachers participated in the translation of The Collected Works of V. I. Lenin, which was highly commended by the Bureau for the Compilation and Translation of Works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin under the Central Committee of the CPC. In 1997, the department became the first one of its kind to offer a 5-year undergraduate program for Russian and English bilingual majors. It was authorized to confer the master’s and doctoral degrees respectively in 1998 and 2011 and began to recruit master and doctoral candidates in 1999 and 2012. Over more than half a century, it has cultivated hundreds of outstanding professionals in Russian language, culture and literature.
The Department of Russian currently has a faculty of 8 full-time teachers, including 3 professors (2 doctoral supervisors), 3 associate professors and 2 lecturers. There are also 2 guest professors and 1 foreign teacher. All the teachers have postgraduate degrees, 6 of them being doctoral degree holders, and have been visiting scholars at Russian universities. The department ranked 6th and 7th respectively in the discipline of Russia among the 140 Chinese universities that offer this program, according to the 2015 and 2016 China University and Discipline Professional Evaluation Reports jointly issued by the Research Center for Chinese Science Evaluation (RCCSE), Wuhan University’s China Education Quality Evaluation Center, and Network of Science & Education Evaluation in China (www.nseac.com).
The 5-year Russian-English bilingual education program is a successful attempt to cultivate talents with good Russian and English language proficiency who can engage in teaching, international trade, foreign affairs, tourism, etc. As one of the “Characteristic Majors” of Soochow University, it boasts a bilingual education model which is reputed to be the “Soochow University Model” in the academic circles. Most students can complete the study for two undergraduate majors within 5 years and successfully pass ТРЯ 8 and TEM-8 exams. The first-time employment rate of graduates remains above 95% in successive years. The department has established solid partnerships with many renowned Russian universities and about 80% of its undergraduate students, funded by the China Scholarship Council or an inter-school exchange program, have the opportunity to study in Russia for one semester or one academic year.
The teachers of the Department of Russian have made remarkable achievements in many academic fields, including Russian language and culture, Russian pragmatics, Russian literature and Russian lexicology, attracting great attention from academic circles both at home and abroad. In recent years, the faculty members have taken charge of 10 projects supported by the National Social Science Foundation (including 1 key project), 4 projects supported by Social Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (including 1 major project of the Key Research Base of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education), and several municipal-level projects. The teachers have won 3 second prizes and 1 third prize of ministerial and provincial-level research achievement awards, and several municipal-level awards. They have published more than 10 works including monographs, translations, dictionaries and textbooks as well as about 100 papers in core journals on foreign languages. In 2019, Professor Cheng Jiajun won the Outstanding Contribution Award for Chinese Russian Education, which is the highest honor in China for scholars of the Russian language.
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Contact: borisji@163.com
